NEWTOWN, Conn. — Investigators tried to figure out what led a bright but painfully awkward 20-year-old to slaughter 26 children and adults at a Connecticut elementary school, while townspeople sadly took down some of their Christmas decorations and struggled Saturday with how to go on.

Families as far away as Puerto Rico began to plan funerals for victims who still had their baby teeth, world leaders extended condolences, and vigils were held around the U.S.

Relatives of the shooter, whose victims included his mother, were at a loss for words.

“The whole family is traumatized by this event,” said a police official who knows the family. A family statement read: “We reach out to the community of Newtown and express our heartfelt sorrow for this incomprehensible and profound loss of innocence.”

Heroism and horror

Amid the sorrow, stories of heroism emerged, including an account of the Sandy Hook Elementary School principal and the school psychologist who lost their lives rushing toward the gunman, Adam Lanza, in an attempt to stop him.

Police shed no light on what triggered the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, though state police Lt. Paul Vance said investigators had found “very good evidence ... that our investigators will be able to use in painting the complete picture, the how and, more importantly, the why.” He would not elaborate.

However, another law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators have found no note or manifesto from Lanza of the sort they have come to expect after murderous rampages such as the Virginia Tech bloodbath in 2007 that left 33 people dead.

The mystery deepened as Newtown education officials said they had found no link between Lanza’s mother and the school, contrary to news reports that said she was a teacher there. Investigators said they believe Adam Lanza attended Sandy Hook Elementary many years ago, but they had no explanation for why he went there Friday.

Lanza shot to death his mother, Nancy Lanza, at the home they shared, then drove to the school in her car with at least three of her guns, forced his way inside and opened fire in two classrooms, authorities said. Within minutes, he killed 20 children, six adults and himself.

James Champion, Nancy Lanza’s brother and a retired police captain in Kingston, N.H., said through the police chief that he had not seen his nephew in eight years. Champion, who still works as a part-time officer, said he would not discuss what might have triggered the rampage since the case is under investigation.

Black Christmas

On Saturday, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver said all the victims at the school were shot with a rifle, at least some of them up close, and all of them were apparently shot more than once. All six adults killed at the school were women. Of the 20 children, eight were boys and 12 were girls. All the children were 6 or 7 years old.

Asked how many bullets were fired, Carver said, “I’m lucky if I can tell you how many I found.”

The tragedy plunged Newtown into mourning and added the picturesque New England community of handsome colonial homes, red-brick sidewalks and 27,000 people to the grim map of towns where mass shootings in recent years have periodically reignited the national debate over gun control but led to little change.

Signs around town read, “Hug a teacher today,” “Please pray for Newtown” and “Love will get us through.”

“People in my neighborhood are feeling guilty about it being Christmas. They are taking down decorations,” said Jeannie Pasacreta, a psychologist who was advising parents struggling with how to talk to their children.

The list of the dead was released Saturday, but in the tightly knit town, nearly everyone already seemed to know someone who died.

Among the dead was well-liked Principal Dawn Hochsprung, 47, who town officials say tried to stop the rampage and paid with her life, and school psychologist Mary Sherlach, 56, who probably would have helped survivors grapple with the tragedy.

“Next week is going to be horrible,” said the town’s legislative council chairman, Jeff Capeci, thinking about the string of funerals the town will face. “Horrible, and the week leading into Christmas.”

Parents ask why

School board chairwoman Debbie Leidlein spent Friday night meeting with parents who lost children and shivered as she recalled those conversations. “They were asking why. They can’t wrap their minds around it. Why? What’s going on?” she said. “And we just don’t have any answers for them.”

Nancy Lanza, who was once a stockbroker for John Hancock in Boston and once lived in Kingston, N.H., was a kind, considerate and loving person, Kingston Police Chief Donald Briggs Jr. said.

“She was very involved in the community and very well-respected,” Briggs said.

Authorities said Adam Lanza had no criminal history, and it was not clear whether he had a job. Lanza was believed to have suffered from a personality disorder, said a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Lanza’s family was struggling to make sense of what happened and “trying to find whatever answers we can,” his father, Peter Lanza, said in a statement late Saturday that also expressed sympathy for the victims’ families.

The school will be closed next week — some parents can’t even conceive of sending their children back, Leidlein said — and officials are deciding what to do about the town’s other schools.

Asked if the town would recover, Maryann Jacob, a clerk in the school library who took cover in a storage room with 18 fourth-graders during the shooting rampage, said: “We have to. We have a lot of children left.”

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If you mean tightening up on the gun show sale laws I agree. No one should be able to purchase a gun without a background check. If you mean registering all guns, I disagree. I also agree with harsher measures for those who use guns to commit felonies.

Some people think the First Amendment, the right to free speech, is the most important. I disagree. The Second Amendment is more important. I say this because you can not defend your right to free speech with your mouth.

to offer misplaced blame. Ok, wthomas, how about you look up how many gun laws we already have in this country already.

Gun control is just a weak crutch used by the left. How about addressing the tougher underlying issue of what causes a 20 year old to decide to randomly open fire on elementary students? Maybe the denigration of core values and morals as a result of the social progressive infiltration of our culture. Or how about the systematic defamation and removal of anything religious, by the left? It's so much easier to blame an inanimate object isn't it? Weak, very weak.

... having a permit, I have had a Georgia Firearms License (What some call a concealed wepons permit) ever since I was 21 years old. Registering guns is a different story. That makes it entirely too easy to disarm law abiding citizenry and you just know the felons, thugs and miscreants are not going to register theirs.

This, I believe, is a unreasonable as well as a irrational belief continuously perpetrated by gun advocates. It is one thrown out by such organizations as the NRA to arouse their membership for donations.

In this day and age if the government wanted your guns they would get them. Since taking guns from law abiding citizens is a violation of the Constitution there is no rational argument to registering every firearm made and sold. If you have gotten a gun permit then it is logical to assume that the government already knows that you own or is likely to own a gun.

Every gun made should be test fired for their rifling signature.
Every gun sold should be registered.
Every gun bought has to be to a person with a permit to own a gun.
Every crime committed where a gun was used should carry a mandatory sentence without the possibility of parole.

No gun can be sold at any gun show without a background check.
The consequences of having and using a gun should be taught in school.

I own a gun and have a permit to carry. I have never feared the government taking my gun from me.

here comes all of the moronic comments about gun control ! this is NOT about gun control, this is about a psychotic man! a mentally ill son of a teacher. who cares if he had the gun legally or illegally?? what difference does that make? the problem is sick people doing sick things...it has nothing to do with the dang NRA.... give me a break. for every 10 legal carrying gun toting individuals, there will always going to be one crazy one in the bunch. nobody can determine when someone will snap.

For all of us that are law abiding citizens that own a gun we are in jeopardy of having these "rights" taken from us or curtailed severly if sensible laws concerning how guns are sold and the qualifications to own a gun are not dealt with.

Gun violence in this country, regardless of the mental faculty of those that use guns in the commission of a crime, has been on an increase. Not all criminals that kill people with guns are mentally ill.

People who believe that guns should be available to any and every one with little to no regulations or personal responsibilities are the very ones that will be responsible when the 2nd amendment gets amended.

Only imbecilic morons believe that every thing concerning the sales of firearms is ok; that only the mentally ill do these types of crimes and that sensible gun laws is just a way to eventually end the right to bear arms.

Incidents like this are becoming more common because the fabric of our society has been unraveling for quite some time. We have taken morals, ethics and God out of the classrooms, out of families, out of society in general. In it's stead, the liberals have substituted relative morality and situational ethics, which fosters and encourages evil. Add to this the desensitization of our children, from video games, movies and TV and this is the result.

The fact that the liberal left will jump on the anti-gun crusade as a result of this is not surprising. Just look at wthomas' initial post if you want example.

Not the guns, or even the killings. We have 312,000,000 people in this country. 30 died today in one tragic event. Your chances of dying from a firearm are 1 in 325, after today...it is still in 1 in 325.

All this nonsense of gun control, gun laws, registering guns will not change anything. Many Many more children, around 3000, die every year from ACCIDENTAL hand gun discharge.

Lets get realistic. You have a 1 in 6 chance of dying from heart disease. 1 in 7 from cancer. Where is the outcry?

Give it a month and everyone will forget what happened today, until next year when it comes on some news cast for ten seconds. Remember October 2, 2006? I bet you don't.

The majority of gun owners want sensible gun laws like closing the gun show loopholes. If one is a law abiding citizen there should not be any outrage on having mandatory background checks for every purchaser of firearms.

There should be mandatory registering of every firearm as well as having each gun's rifling signature on file. If one is a law abiding citizen there is no logical reason on why these relatively small measures can not be made law.

There should be a law limiting the amount of guns one can buy each month. Law abiding citizens have no reason to oppose this simple but useful law.

There are no logical reasons for having clips that holds dozens of rounds.

Enablers of those that kill can always think of many ridiculous reasons why guns should have few if any laws attached to them but let them make that nonsensical rationale to the parents of those babies that died in Connecticut. And while you are at it explain to them why their children's death are insignificant relative to the overall violence in this country.

Lastly no one is talking about making guns illegal. I know that there are some that use this to avoid doing anything about gun violence but this argument is a ploy to keep the status quo which in this country is helping to cause the needless deaths of thousands.

of your earlier suggestions would have stopped Adam from his mental defective rage and mayhem. Not one. Backgrounded, registered, rifling pattern stored, ammo propellent tagged, whatever - no barrier to the killing, just ID of the perp long after the burials. How about we tag and trace the mental defectives - not unlike the Great White Sharks currently off our coast? Stop the culprit, not the implement.

Maybe it would not have helped here but none of these suggestions would have prevented any law abiding citizen from owning any firearm(s).

[i]"How about we tag and trace the mental defectives"[/i]

And who determines who are the mental defectives and to what degree of mental impairment do we draw the line?

I am for a thorough background check on any one that purchases a firearm. So lets pass a law that provides such and get the criteria for these so called "mental defectives" so they can be screened out.

Findings of a survey by GOP pollster Frank Luntz showing that NRA members and gun owners overwhelmingly support a variety of laws designed to keep firearms out of dangerous hands, even as the Washington gun lobby prepares to spend unprecedented millions supporting candidates who pledge to oppose any changes to U.S. gun laws.

87 percent of NRA members agree that support for Second Amendment rights goes hand-in-hand with keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.

There is very strong support for criminal background checks among NRA members and gun owners:

[i]

● 74 percent of NRA members and 87 percent of non-NRA gun owners support requiring criminal background checks of anyone purchasing a gun.

● 79 percent of NRA members and 80 percent of non-NRA gun owners support requiring gun retailers to perform background checks on all employees – a measure recently endorsed by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms industry.

● 75 percent of NRA members believe concealed carry permits should only be granted to applicants who have not committed any violent misdemeanors, including assault.

● 74 percent of NRA members believe permits should only be granted to applicants who have completed gun safety training.

● 68 percent of NRA members believe permits should only be granted to applicants who do not have prior arrests for domestic violence.

● 63 percent of NRA members believe permits should only be granted to applicants 21 years of age or older.[/i]

The NRA rank and file also supports barring people on terror watch lists from buying guns (71 percent) and believe the law should require gun owners to alert police to lost and stolen guns (64 percent). The NRA’s Washington office strongly opposes both measures.

The Frank Luntz poll of 945 gun owners nationwide was conducted in May 2012 and was divided evenly by gun owners who were current or lapsed members of the NRA and non-NRA gun owners. The poll has a margin of error of + 3 percent.

Even when NRA members support common sense gun legislation the head of the NRA and other pro gun lobbies oppose them.

Sorry to inform all of you, but all of the gun control suggestions that you have came up with are already in law, and in no way would prevent something like this. Before you shoot off your mouths, check and learn what gun control laws are in effect. The answer is all. The only way something like this could be prevented is for everyone to be more aware of what is going on around them at all times.
Note: for those of you who think the NO TOLARENCE aproach is a good thing, stop and think. If a law abiding citizen had been armed at that school, He/She could poss taken out the shooter and saved lifes. Your police in most cases can not prevent something like this, but, if an armed citizen had been present the total loss of life could have been reduced.
For those of you too stupid to understand I'll put it this way. A gun does not Kill. People Kill. Dis arm your lawful citizens, and only the bad will have guns. If I wanted to kill a lot of people, not having a gun would not stop me or even slow me down. We learned in VietNam that there are many ways to kill without guns.
For those who do not believe that disarming the citizens by the govrnment is no big thing, then you'd better back up and study history. Be afraid of your government, be very afraid. Look at what our government is doing right now, and be ver afraid.

In a society that glorifies gratuitous violence, where video games can be purchased that glorify killing of innocents, where the theme of virtually every movie is the killing of one person, or persons, by another, is it any surprise when a sick or evil individual commits such atrocities? Is the solution really to pass further legislation regulating the tool used to commit such acts? How many laws were broken in the commission of this horrible act? Do we really think that further laws will prevent this type of thing from happening in the future?

When I was just a little child, my parents told me "its better to let some people think your stupid than to open your mouth and make most of them think your stupid". Jackie, were you told this as a child. YOU keep running your mouth about things that you know nothing about, and are too stupid to understand. Also most gun owners (legal ones) believe that there are adiquate laws in effect and None of them will keep a sick-o from killing people. Grow up, get a life, and wise up before offering your openion. PS have a Merry Christmas everyone.

Thats Ok Dok, at least you can clearly understand what I'm saying, unlike you, who leave a lot of doubt as to what you mean. If you want to turn this into a grammar and spellin class, perhaps you'd also better brush up before you try to teach any classes.

When you say all the suggestions here are already law, you are are wrong. One of the biggest loopholes is the purchase of guns from a gun show. If you are a dealer at a gun show you still have to do background checks but others don't. I have seen film footage where an individual buys from a dealer than passes the gun to the guy next to him. This guy could not pass a background check so he paid someone else. This was done in plain view of the dealer.

Seldom do I agree with JackieTD but I agree with at least 80% of what he is saying. I still disagree that guns should be registered. It is even more rare that I agree with wthomas. Thomas is right about assault weapons especially those with bananna clips. Until the deer start shooting back, nobody needs that much fire power. If ownership of such weapons is allowed, the requirements for obtaining them should be as strict as for the purchase of automatic weapons.

Most of all, I think there should be harsh penalties for using a gun while committing a felony. At least ten years in prison, no plea bargaining, no early parole. You can argue among yourselves as to what to do with a person who has served 10 years for using a gun in a felony then uses a gun again. I vote for capital punishment as they are a genuine threat to society.

I understand there is no way to 100% assure there will not be a repeat of this CT school massacre. Even if there were no guns a bomb can be made from readily available materials aka Timothy McVeigh. At this point even slowing down the whole sale carnage would be wonderful.

...or not, but, what a horrible tragedy for us all. Right now all I can think about is how I would have felt if my daughter had been a victim of such a senseless crime. My heart goes out to the families and friends of those that have been lost.

not doubting what you said about someone passing a background check at a gun show and then passing the gun to someone else, and I'm just asking...isn't there a law against that? If not, there should be. If a citizen legally allowed to possess a firearm furnishes a firearm to someone not legally allowed, that legally allowed person should do 20 years...in my humble opinion.

is so horrible, it is very hard to imagine how a human being could murder little children in cold blood. I was so horrified I could not even post about it Friday. All I kept thinking that when my 2 boys were 6 and seven how I would not be able to live without my children. Where do these people come from and why is there is no warning/paper trail. He even shot his own mother for heavens sake. Was there any warning at all?

...I cannot fathom any sensible consideration for not registering EVERY gun and not conducting background checks for EVERY gun sale. Large ammo purchases and a history of buying a lot of weapons should be a red flag. That is a no brainer. Likewise, it is rather obvious that private citizens have no need for high capacity magazines or bullets designed to maximize damage in their targets.

It is instructive that the European Union has even more people altogether with a tiny fraction of the gun crime we have. However, not long ago a cretin in Norway gunned down many innocents. So, we cannot overstate the effectiveness of gun control laws. They will not stop all of those that wish to inflict this kind of harm. In this tragedy, the shooter didn't even buy the guns.

[i]"At this point even slowing down the whole sale carnage would be wonderful."[/i]

This is something that you and I and other responsible adults can agree upon.

I have heard that this isn't the time to talk about gun laws but if this isn't the time then when?

As someone that has seen violent death happen and as someone that has been shot at I know the feeling of helplessness that one can have when these things happen but it is time to look seriously at the laws concerning guns.

I hope this happens and within the Constitution right to keep and bear arms some sensible changes can be made that would at least slow down the whole sale carnage as you aptly put it so these types of violent acts can be made rare even if they can not be stopped completely.

As to 1a12 question about the death penalty. I am against the death penalty for various reasons although I must admit that when a crime like this happens it does challenge these reasons.